CHAPTER VII.
The corner-stone of the social structure in France was the dogma that work was degrading; and not only manual labor, but anything done with the object of producing wealth was a degradation. The only honorable occupation for a gentleman was either to pray or to fight.
Society in France was, therefore, divided into three classes: the Clergy, called the "First Estate"; the Nobility, composing the "Second Estate," and the working and trading classes, the "Third Estate," or Tiers État.
Out of reverence for their spiritual office, precedence in rank was given to the clergy. But the actual ruling class was the nobility. The business of the clergy was to minister to souls. The business of the nobility was warfare. That of the third estate, the toiling class, being to support the other two. And whatever existed in the form of property or wealth in feudal times was produced by the Tiers État.
The lowest stratum of the third estate was composed of "serfs." A serf belonged absolutely, with all that he possessed, to his lord. He was attached to his land, as are the trees which are rooted in it. There was, however, a class of serfs above this whom we should now call slaves, but who were by French law then designated as Freemen.
A freeman might go and come under certain restrictions. But this did not by any means imply that he was freed from the proprietor to whom he belonged, to whom he was inevitably bound for military service, or for such contributions or claims as might be levied upon him.
As was to be expected, it was in the cities that this half-emancipated class congregated; these cities as naturally becoming the centres of the various industries required to supply the necessities and luxuries of the two ruling classes. In this way there were being created various centres of wealth, which meant power, and which would have to be reckoned with in the future.
The thin edge of the wedge was inserted when individual freemen offered money to their hard-pressed feudal lords in exchange for certain privileges, and then for charters. And as more money was needed by proprietors for their lavish expenditures, more freedom and more charters were acquired, until, having purchased immunities and privileges enough to make them to some extent self-governing, the town became what was called a commune.
It was Louis VI., fifth king in the Capetian line, who completed this work of emancipation by recognizing the communes as free cities, and bestowing franchises clearly defining their rights. By this act the body of the manufacturing class, or burgesses, was recognized as a part of the body politic, and was enfranchised.
A free city was a small republic. The entire body of inhabitants must take the communal oath, and when summoned by the tolling of the bell must all appear at the meeting of the General Assembly for the purpose of choosing their magistrates. This done, the assembly dissolved, and the magistrates were left with a free hand to rule or ruin, until checked by popular outbreak or a new election.
As is always the case, time developed two classes: an inferior population, with a furious spirit of democracy, and a superior class, more conservative, and desirous of keeping peace with the great proprietors.
In this simple, humble fashion were the people groping toward freedom, and experimenting with the alphabet of self-government.
The acknowledgment of the free cities by Louis VI., was the first move toward an alliance between the king and the people; an alliance which would eventually wrest the power from the hands of the nobles. But that end was still far off. Another accession to the kingly power came in the succeeding reign when Louis VII. married Eleanor, daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine; and her great inheritance, the largest of the feudal states, was thereby annexed to the crown: a marriage which made some troublesome chapters in the history of two kingdoms, of which we shall hear later. But, in the duel between king and peerage, the balance of power was moving toward the throne.
At the time these things were happening that great event, the Crusades, had already commenced.
It was in 1095 that Peter the Hermit, returning from a pilgrimage, by command of the Pope went throughout Europe proclaiming the desecration of the holy places. At a council held at Clermont in France, 1095, the first Crusade was proclaimed by Urban II. Led by Peter the Hermit, a vast undisciplined host, without preparation, rushed indiscriminately toward Asia Minor, perishing by famine, disease, and the sword before they reached their goal. Undismayed by this, another Crusade was immediately organized under the direction of the greatest nobles in France; and in three years (1099) the Holy City had been captured, the Cross floated over the Holy Sepulchre, and Godfrey of Boulogne, leader of the expedition, was proclaimed King of Jerusalem.
France had inaugurated the most extraordinary movement in the history of civilization. Appealing as it did to the knightly and to the romantic ideal, what an opportunity was here for idle adventurous nobles, their occupation gone through changed conditions! If the Church, by "the Truce of God," had bid them sheathe their swords, now she bade them to be drawn in the defence of all that was sacred. The entire body of nobility would have rushed if it could to the Holy Land. Poor barons sold or mortgaged their lands and their castles, and the Third Estate grew rich, and the free cities still freer, upon the necessities of the hour. But all classes, from king to serf, were for the first time moved by a common sentiment; and not alone France, but the choicest and best of Europe was poured in one great volume of passionate zeal into those successive waves which eight times inundated Palestine. Private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life, treasure, all eagerly given, for what? That a small bit of territory a thousand miles distant be torn from profaning infidels, because it was the birthplace of a religion these champions failed to comprehend; a religion worn upon their battle-flags but not in their hearts.
The second Crusade, 1147, was led by Conrad, Emperor of Germany, and Louis VII. of France. The profligate conduct of Queen Eleanor, who accompanied her royal consort, led to serious political conditions. Louis appealed to the pope, who consented to the divorce he desired. This proved simply an exchange of thrones for the fascinating Eleanor. Henry II. of England, already the possessor of immense estates in France, inherited from his father, realized that with Aquitaine, Queen Eleanor's dowry, added to his own, and these again to Normandy, a marriage with the divorced wife of his rival would make him possessor of more than three times the size of the domain controlled by the French king.
The marriage was solemnized in 1152, and France saw her war with the feudal barons overshadowed by the fight for her very life with England, who had fastened this tremendous grasp upon her kingdom.
The first truly great Capetian king came with this emergency. Philip Augustus, son of Louis VII., in the year 1180, when only fifteen years of age, seized the reins with the hand of a born ruler. Before he was twenty-one he had broken up a combination of feudal barons against him. Then he turned to England. Queen Eleanor and her sons were conspiring against Henry II. So he made friends with them. The palace on the island in the Seine was an asylum where John and Richard might plot against their father. And when a third Crusade was planned, 1189, it had as leaders Philip Augustus of France, Richard I., who had just succeeded his father, Henry II., as King of England, and Barbarossa (Frederick I.), the great Emperor of Germany. Before the Holy Land was reached the wise and crafty Philip Augustus and the fiery Richard had quarrelled.
Philip had been carefully observing these two brothers who were successively to wear the crown of England. He knew the foibles of the romantic and picturesque Richard; and he also knew that John, corrupt to the core, was a traitor to whom no trust would be sacred. In his own cold-blooded fashion he intended to use them both.
John had conspired against his own father, now Philip would help him to supplant his brother, while Richard was safely occupied in Palestine. And when he had made John king, he, Philip Augustus, was to be rewarded by the gift of Normandy! With this in view, Philip returned to France. It was an ingenious plot, but all was spoiled by Richard's safe return from the thrilling adventures of the Crusade. In 1199, however, the crown passed naturally to John by the death of his brother, and this vicious son of Eleanor was King of England.
There were other means of recovering his lost possessions. Philip espoused the cause of the young Arthur, John's nephew, a rival claimant to the English throne. And when that ill-fated Prince was murdered, as is believed by the orders of his uncle, for this and other offences King John, as Duke of Normandy—thence vassal to the King of France—was summoned to be tried by his peers.
When after oft-repeated summons John refused to appear at Philip's court, by feudal law the King of France had legal authority to take possession of the dukedom.
In vain did King John strive to defend by arms his vanishing possessions. In the war which ensued, all north of the Loire was seized by Philip, and at one stroke he had mastered his enemies at home and abroad.
Not only were Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou restored to France, but they were hereafter to be held, not by dukes and counts, as before, but by the king, as a part of the royal domain. And kingship, towering high above all the great barons of France, had for the first time become a reality.
It was Philip's policy of expansion which gave color to his reign; not an expansion which would bring extension into foreign lands, but solidity and firmness of outline to France itself. We have seen how and why this policy was vigorously carried out in the north. The growth toward the south is a less pleasant story.
The province of Toulouse, nominally subject to France, was actually ruled by Raymond VI., "by grace of God" Count of Toulouse. Perhaps if this province had not possessed and controlled several ports on the Mediterranean, while France had none at all, it might not have been discovered that this home of the "gay science," and of minstrelsy, and of all that was gentle and refining, was in fact the nursery of a dangerous heresy, and that the poetic, music-loving children of Provence reviled the cross and worshipped the devil!
We can easily imagine that in this highly developed community there had arisen a spirit of inquiry into prevailing conditions and beliefs in the Church. And we can also imagine that a crafty sovereign saw in this an opportunity to serve his own ends. And so, Pope Innocent III. ordered a Crusade, and John de Montfort not only opened up the Mediterranean ports for Philip, but brought Toulouse, the greatest of the remaining feudal states, into subjection to the King of France; at the same time forever silencing the voice of the heretic, of the minstrel, and of the harp; even the speech, with its delicate inflections and musical intonations, disappeared, to be heard nevermore. Such, in brief, is the story of the "Albigensian War," so called on account of the heresy having been brought into Provence by the Albigenses from Switzerland.
After a century and a half Normandy was restored. Its reabsorption into France marked the parting of the ways in two kingdoms. Kingship was reinforced in one, and citizenship developed in the other. In England the nobles and the people drew closer together, resolved to defend themselves from a vicious king, and this determined effort to curtail the royal prerogative produced the Magna Charta, which forever secured the liberties of Englishmen (1215). In France, on the contrary, the power was moved in one volume toward the king and despotism. Both nations were in the hands of fate—a fate, too, which was using unscrupulous men to accomplish its great purposes for each.
But however we may disparage Philip's heart and aims, no one can deny the breadth and superiority of his mind and his statesmanship. He was a Charlemagne made on a smaller scale, and without a conscience. Not one of the successors of Clovis or of Pepin had so intelligently grasped the sources of permanent growth in a nation. He may have been false of tongue and unprincipled in deed, but he took the free cities under his personal protection, opened up trade with foreign lands, beautified Paris and France. He may, under the cloak of religion, have permitted unjustifiable cruelties against the most innocent, the most gifted province in Europe, in order to secure access to the sea for France. But he left the communes richer and happier, his kingdom freer from local tyrannies, transformed from a pandemonium of struggling knights and barons into the nearest approach yet realized to a modern state.